


The Sums Don't Add Up At All

by sequence_fairy



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, F/M, Smut, time skip fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 00:36:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7663294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And maybe, it would have been better, if they'd never crossed that line, because maybe then, he'd be able to forget what she felt like in the dark, against his skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sums Don't Add Up At All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blancsanglier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blancsanglier/gifts).



> For Erin, who probably regrets asking me 'what if Ichigo and Rukia were sleeping together before Farewell Swords?". Title lifted from Three Seed by Silversun Pickups.

Falling into bed (or against a wall) with Rukia is not something that happens after every fight or every night. Rather, it seems to happen only when one of them is frantic with the need to confirm that the other one is still breathing, and the best way to do this is with hitched gasps and moans and the clutch and grab of hands and bodies. 

Ichigo can count these occurrences on his hands and still have fingers left over.

The first time, it is almost an accident – as much as these sorts of things can be accidents – and they come together in a feverish rush of heated skin and pounding hearts and a desperate need to reaffirm the fact that they’d lived through the fight together. 

Ichigo still remembers the taste of blood on Rukia’s lips - they hadn’t even made it back to his dark bedroom before she was grabbing at his robes and tugging at his hair, dragging his mouth down to hers. Ichigo had lasted all of thirty-five seconds, and been left reeling by the feel of Rukia - searing heat and the kind of friction that nearly sixteen year-old boys dream about the whole world over.

The second time had been much the same - the meteoric rise of the heat in his blood and the light speed release as Rukia writhed beneath him, and then the hot, wet, slip-slide of his tongue and fingers against her most delicate of places until her thighs gripped him tight around the ears and all he could feel was the clench of her body around his hand.

There’s nothing more life-affirming than the sound Rukia makes when he tips her over the edge and both of them slingshot through the adrenaline crash with an oxytocin overload. Ichigo comes away from each encounter more and more convinced that nothing short of an actual apocalypse will tear them apart.

(It doesn’t quite take an apocalypse, but something close to it.)

Which is why, when he realises what he’s given up to save her (and oh, he’d do it again in a heartbeat, no questions asked) the weight of it is like a punch to the gut. It hits him just as he’s fading into unconsciousness in front of her, as he stumbles forward and then to the ground - and it takes all the breath out of his lungs.

—

When he wakes up, days later, the world around him feels like he’s miles underwater. He feels cut off from some formative part of himself and realises with a start that there’s no one in his head but him. Rukia is curled into the chair beside the bed he is lying in - pretzeled around herself like she’s trying to shut out the world, but otherwise, he’s alone.

For the first time in _years_ , there is no one else in his head. It feels like a barren desert - there is no stalwart strength, no barely repressed madness and the ripple of cold wind that was always just out of his reach is gone.

He tries to sit up, but he’s kitten-weak, and the effort of movement makes sweat bead on his forehead. Rukia stirs when he flops back, panting. He doesn’t see her move, but all of a sudden she’s in his face, her eyes searching his.

“Ichigo,” she says, and there’s something breathless and pleading in her voice. Ichigo swallows hard. He’s never understood how she undoes him with just his name, and he’s not going to try to figure it out now.

“What is it?” Ichigo asks, because her silence coupled with the sheen of tears in her eyes is starting to scare him, and it doesn’t help that he can hardly feel the pulse of her _reiatsu_ against his own. It’s like he’s flying blind. “Rukia,” he insists, and there’s an edge of desperation to his voice that he doesn’t like but can’t seem to turn off. “What is going on?”

“Can you feel me?”

Ichigo hesitates. He can’t, not really, and he wonders suddenly, if he is actually sensing her, or if it’s just muscle memory of the way he knows she feels. 

“Ichigo,” she says, and there’s steel in her voice now, enough that it makes his eyes snap to hers again.

He swallows, and reaches out, straining against the thick, muffling blanket that seems to suffocate his senses. There’s only the fog, murky and pea-soup against the knife-edge of his increasingly desperate attempts to find Rukia’s _reiatsu._ “I–” he starts, and then; “what happened to me?”

“The final _getsuga tensho_ ,” Rukia murmurs, and it all comes rushing back. The lesson, the choice, the no-win scenario. The snap and fizz of his _reiatsu_ when he’d let it go, the feel of all of his power flowing out of his fingers and then, the long buzzing stretch of nothing when it had, finally, run out.

“It’s all gone,” Ichigo says, and Rukia nods.

“You have barely enough _reiatsu_ left to stay here in the _seireitei_.”

“How–” Ichigo chokes on the word. “–long?”

“Not long enough,” Rukia says, and then her eyes widen, as if the words slipped out without her permission. There’s a stretch of silence. Rukia is the one to break it. “Ichigo, I have to take you back to the _gensei_. We have to leave while you’re still strong enough make it through the _dangai_.”

She waits for him to respond.

They look at each other for a long time, and Ichigo decides now is a good time (as good a time as any, since he figures there won’t be many more opportunities for it - and _god_ , doesn’t that just make the bottom drop out of his stomach) to figure out what colour, exactly, her eyes are. Objectively, he knows they’re that sort of really dark blue that looks almost purple, but in the sunlight, they look positively violet - the kind of violet that the sky lusts after during a sunset. Now though, they are shadowed with a kind of bone-deep exhaustion, and also, curiously, over-bright.

He realises then, what it is that he’s doing - he’s cataloguing things, finding the perfect details in order to keep them, because what if this is the last time he sees her like _this_ \- in her proper visage, not the façade of a _gigai_. He shakes the thought away, and and props himself up against the pillows.

“Urahara thinks he can give you a boost to get you home, but –” she pauses, looks down and away, and her next words are a whisper. “He doesn’t think he can give you your powers back. They’re _gone_ Ichigo, how could you have been so _stupid_? We _need_ you,” she pauses again, and looks back up him. Her eyes pin him, and Ichigo feels naked under her gaze. She blinks, and a tear catches in her lashes. “ _I_ need you,” she says, so softly, that Ichigo has to strain to hear her.

Ichigo closes his eyes. It’s both too much and too little to look at her right now.

—

Urahara makes good on his promise to help, and with a clever application of _kido_ , along with generously donated vials of power from many of the officers of the _gotei_ , Ichigo wakes up on a sunny morning, feeling a little more like himself. His head is still curiously empty, but when he reaches out with the borrowed power, he can feel the gentle brush of Rukia’s _reiatsu_ against the tentative edges of his own.

“How are you feeling?” Rukia asks when he finds her, sitting, her legs dangling off the edge of the porch that walks out from his sickroom. Ichigo lowers himself to sitting beside her. His feet brush the ground.

“A bit weird,” he admits, and she snorts, bumping his shoulder with hers.

“That’s to be expected,” she answers, and Ichigo nods. He’s watching the sunlight catch in her hair. “We’ll leave for the _gensei_ as soon as you’re ready.”

Ichigo swallows. He wants to ask what she’ll do if he decides he’s never ready, if he decides that he’d rather fade out here in _seireitei_ with her, instead of going back to a world he knows she won’t be a part of.

In the end, Rukia makes the decision for him, and they leave that afternoon.

The trip through the _dangai_ , back to the Living World, saps nearly the entirety of the small amount of strength Ichigo has managed to regain. By the time they come through the gate, he’s leaning heavily on Rukia.

“Let’s get you back into your body.” 

Rukia dumps him, unceremoniously, on the bed next to his body. Ichigo slips inside (it’s almost too easy - his spirit so weakened that it melts into his physical body without a fight) and opens his eyes. Rukia is blurred around the edges and he blinks to try and bring her into focus. She almost glows in the shadows of his room. She’s watching him warily. He blinks again, but she still doesn’t resolve into sharp focus. Ichigo sits up; his head swims. He blinks again, and notices that he can’t see her feet.

“Take me back out. Please, I can’t – you’re fading – Rukia, _please_.”

“What if you can’t go back?”

Ichigo shakes his head. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he _doesn’t care_.

“I need to see you properly,” he says, and he can hear her swallow. “You look like a _ghost_ ,” he continues - and there it is, that’s the problem with this whole thing. She looks too much like a ghost, too much like something ethereal and unreal. He can’t deal with that on top of everything else.

“I could find my _gigai_ –” Rukia starts.

“No,” Ichigo interrupts, cutting her off. He’s watching the ends of her hair disappear.

“Okay,” she relents finally, and Ichigo breathes in as she punches him out of his body. She sharpens immediately, even while the rest of his room goes soft around the edges.

“Now what?” Rukia asks, and Ichigo grits his teeth and heaves himself towards her. It’s pathetic how weak he is, but she catches him, her hands on his shoulders.

“Give me this,” he whispers, and leans in. Rukia lets him kiss her, lets him bear her down beneath him, and lets him run his hands across her body. She arches under him and Ichigo gasps at the slide of their bodies together. He knows this is the last time, and when he opens his eyes to find her watching him, something shadowed in her eyes, he knows she knows too.

The first time they’d come together like this, he’d thought he was going to lose her - her stomach is unmarked now, but Ichigo can still see the ragged wound that nearly took her from him when he closes his eyes - and now, he knows he’s going to lose her, and just like then, he’s powerless to stop it from happening. There’s a kind of symmetry in this, Ichigo thinks, as he watches Rukia’s eyes flutter shut and her mouth drop open as he slides his hands underneath her robes, palms cupping her breasts.

She hooks one of her legs around his and rolls him, and Ichigo goes willingly. She rises over him, and tugs at the ties of his robes, hands finding his skin with practiced ease. She takes him in hand, and Ichigo shudders beneath her. He’s going to fall apart before they get to the best part if she keeps going like this, and Ichigo bites down on his fist when she leans up and sinks down over him.

The heat of her is still incredible, and Ichigo thinks he’ll never get used to the feel of it, nor will he ever get any better at holding out. Rukia seems to sense that he wants to draw this out, and her rhythm stays slow and easy, the heat between them building almost deceptively slowly.

Rukia arches, and drops back onto hands she’s planted on his thighs and Ichigo tries, in vain, to capture this moment in all it’s glory in his memory. She’s all moon-kissed and dawn-flushed as she rides him, her head thrown back and the long line of her neck exposed.

He wishes he could take advantage, but he’s barely strong enough now to match the movements of her hips with his own. She changes the angle, leaning forward over his chest, and Ichigo’s breath stutters in his lungs. She plants her hands on his shoulders, and her nails dig in, and Ichigo welcomes the sting.

“God, Rukia,” he groans, and she rolls her hips into his and Ichigo hisses in a breath. His hands come up around her, one on her hip, the other buried in the hair at the base of her skull and she kisses him like she’s drowning. He amends the thought - he’s the one drowning, desperate to have the scent of her in his nose and the feel of her skin beneath his hands. There’s nowhere he’d rather be than here, in his bed, with her.

She’s still moving, slowly yet steadily driving him onwards, and the pooling heat at the base of his spine coils tighter and tighter. She drops her mouth to the join of his neck and shoulder and picks up the pace just a touch, and it’s enough for the coil to snap. He muffles her name in the skin of her shoulder, and Rukia buries his in his neck.

—

The next afternoon, they stand, barely a foot apart, on the street out front of the clinic, in front of everyone, and Ichigo can’t even reach out to touch her - she’s going translucent before his very eyes.

“I guess this is farewell,” she says, and Ichigo nods.

“Seems so,” he replies, and then Rukia makes a joke, but no one’s laughing, and Ichigo thinks that it would be easier if he’d just died like he’d meant to. There’s sacrifice and then there’s _sacrifice_ and this is neither noble nor righteous. It feels instead, like someone is clawing through his insides even while he teases her back about not being sad.

(They both know he’s lying.)

“Bye Rukia,” he says, and she looks up. He’s taken aback by the tears in her eyes. He clenches his fists in the pocket of his hoodie, and wills her to see what he’s thinking.

_I can’t do this without you, you dried the rain, you made the sun come out, how am I supposed to go on without you in my life?_

Rukia blinks. “Okay,” she says, and then steps back. Ichigo watches her go, feels her fade away to nothing, and lifts his gaze to the sky, where he approximates the _senkaimon_ would be.  

“Thank you,” he whispers, knowing she can’t hear him.


End file.
